The Shanghai Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

restaurants with chickens glistening in the window. When I hit six lanes of snarled and honking traffic, I’d reached Canal Street.
    Canal, running east-west through lower Manhattan, was once Chinatown’s border, but those days are gone. On the immigrant flood waters of the last two decades, Chinatown has spread north through what was once Little Italy and east through the formerly Jewish tenements of the Lower East Side. It’s lapping at the blocks west, too, merging with Tribeca and SoHo in a jagged scramble of the newly come and the ultra hip.
    I surveyed the glittering windows of the jewelry row along Canal. As Alice Fairchild had said, they don’t go in much for antiques here. Chinese people value antiquities,but we generally like to know where things have spent the last, oh, five hundred years. Buying old things from strangers carries a risk: Unless you know what happened to the original owner and you’re sure he or she didn’t mind giving up the piece, you’re in danger of acquiring some bad luck along with it.
    Westerners don’t seem to feel that way, and some of the Forty-seventh Street shops carry beautiful antiques. But a Shanghai bureaucrat on the lam might want to steer clear of the yarmulkes and black coats uptown and offer his ill-gotten goods to someone who spoke his language.
    Literally.
    Newcomers from other parts of China notwithstanding, a lot of Chinatown is still Cantonese. Including most of these jewelers. Wong Pan was from Shanghai, and a government official. He’d speak Shanghainese by upbringing and Mandarin by necessity. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t be willing to do business with Cantonese jewelers, and in written Chinese he’d be able to, but I’d bet he’d try his own people first.
    So how would he find them? Most likely, by the shoe-leather method. He’d go from store to store, asking which dialect the proprietor spoke. The real question was, how was
I
going to find them in a way that would cancel out his two-day lead?
    I headed east on Canal, to Golden Dreams.
    “Ling Wan-ju!” Mrs. Chan, my mother’s friend-and-rival, smiled from her perch behind a case of jade bracelets. In the corner, incense smoke twisted up from General Gung’s altar.
    “Hello, Auntie.” Greeting her in Cantonese, I took both her plump hands in mine. “How are you?”
    “For an old lady, I’m well, thank you. You look lovely! California must have agreed with you. I can understand why you extended your trip.”
    Mrs. Chan and my mother sewed side by side at Mr. Leng’s factory the whole time I was growing up. If my mother was going to complain to anyone about my being away, it would be Mrs. Chan. Of course, the way she put it probably had to do with how invaluable I was to my cousins, and how much more my help was needed, even after the wedding, than we’d expected when I made my plans.
    “I had a good time, Auntie, but I’m glad to be home.” I knew that would get back to my mother, and I wanted it to. No point in her staying up all night worrying that I might relocate. “Auntie, I need your help. Professionally.”
    Mrs. Chan’s cheeks crinkled when she smiled. “Of course!” She sat up straighter. Out of loyalty, most of my mother’s friends disapprove of my profession, but Mrs. Chan is different. She watches lots of TV cop shows and likes the idea that I’m fighting crime.
    “Auntie, I need to find jewelers who speak Mandarin or Shanghainese. Do you know any?”
    “Oh, I don’t know if I can help. I’m so busy here in the store, I have no time to waste gossiping with other jewelers.” Having established her bona fides, she went straight on. “Of course, Mr. Lee, at Canal Diamonds, is from Beijing. And Old Wong at Harmony Jewelers, he speaks a dozendialects—anything for a sale, that old man. Yang Nuanyi’s husband is Shanghainese, so maybe she’s learned his dialect. Or maybe not. If I were married to him I’d be happy for an excuse not to talk to him. Mr. Chen at Bright